Here’s a story you may be hearing a lot more about in six months or six years: National Football Leaguers – followed by college, high school, and youth league football players – soon will be gaming corrupt Pittsburgh Steelers/World Wrestling Entertainment doctor Joseph Maroon’s “ImPACT” concussion management software system by taking the amphetamine-family drug Ritalin before being retested to assess their recovery from head injuries.

According to one concussion expert I’ve spoken with, this has already started happening at the NFL level. And of course it makes perfect sense. Ritalin is the medication prescribed most notoriously for “hyperactive” kids and sufferers from ADD (attention deficit disorder), with the goal of improving mental focus. Inevitably, professional athletes and their handlers would seize on Ritalin’s ability to mask the fact that they hadn’t entirely “cleared the cobwebs” from recent blows to the brain.

Related

With due repsect to your so-called experts (Athletic Trainers as a group are not qualified to comment on such instruments), IMPACT was never properly or independently validated. It is poor instrument. What is of greater concern is that Drs. Maroon, Collins and Lovell select and control the Drs. that read results.

Reports of students being instrcuted to sandbag tests, that is, do purposely poorly at baseline are common with ImPact. Further many schools test at inappropriate intervals so natural brain growth in high school and to lesser extent college mask injruies. Joe’s Drs have wide latitude to interpret results. Simply look at Pittsburgh Steeler players who recover instantly when the playoffs approach. And let’s face it, Pro Wrestlers are meat.

You should be hard on Maroon. He is both a quack and a crook. Look deeper, it is much worse than your ATCs understand but they are not trained to understand charlatanism.